Abrahams, Ralph. Chaos Gaia Eros: A Chaos Pioneer Uncovers The Three Great Streams of History. Harper Collins, New York. 1994.

According to Bryce Christensen writing for the American Library association, Abraham--a pioneer in the development of chaos theory--espouses religious and cultural perspectives long buried in oblivion. Although repressed for 6,000 years, Orphic tradition of ancient goddess worship may live for those able to pierce the patriarchal deceits of order and control. The daring will enter into the blessed mysteries of pagan antiquity. Unabashedly utopian, the author interprets current intellectual ferment surrounding chaos theory, the Gaia hypothesis, and aerodynamics as an auspicious sign. If humankind can recognize this world-historical moment, the true Trinity--Chaos, Gaia, and Eros--will once again cover the earth with peace and harmony. The bibliography lists dozens of books in mythology, archaeology, and hermeneutics, but no source provides nearly as much as the author's own potent imagination.

Bruffee, Kenneth. Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge. Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore, MD.,1993. Written for college and university teachers and administrators, arguing that they should think of college and university education as a process of cultural change, and teachers as agents of change, and that teachers have to organize students to learn collaboratively, and re-vise long standing assumptions about teaching. Covino, William A. Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination. State University of New York Press. Albany, New York. 1994.

This book presents a selective, introductory reading of key texts in the history of magic from antiquity forward, in order to construct a suggestive conceptual framework for disrupting our conventional notions about rhetoric and literacy. Offering an overarching, pointed synthesis of the interpenetration of magic, rhetoric, and literacy, William A. Covino draws from theorists ranging from Plato and Cornelius Agrippa to Paulo Freire and Mary Daly, and analyzes the different magics that operate in Renaissance occult philosophy and Romantic literature, as well as in popular indicators of mass literacy such as "The Oprah Winfrey Show"and The National Enquirer.

Futurenatural : Nature, Science, Culture (Futures, New Perspectives for Cultural Analysis) Eds. George Robertson , Melinda Mash , Lisa Tickner. Routledge, 1996. Theorists of culture and science ponder the concept of Nature in the past, present, and future, and consider the impact on our daily lives of recent developments in biotechnologies, electronic media, and ecological politics. They particular explore whether political and cultural debates about the body and the environment can take place without reference to nature or natural. The 18 essays (which include an exclusive interview with Satan) were presented at a November 1994 conference in London. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Haynes, Cynthia. "Inside the Teaching Machine: Actual Feminism and (Virtual) Pedagogy." CWRL Vol. 2, No.1 <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~cwrl/v2n1/haynes/index.html> Ms. Haynes critiques the self critical field of rhetoric and composition.

Hiltz, Starr R. "Collaborative Learning: The Virtual Classroom Approach." T.H.E. Journal 17 (June 1990): 59-65. Hiltz a pioneer in the virtual classroom, discusses her experiences , techniques and studies of collaboration in a networked classroom.

Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. Eds. Brook, James, and Iain A. Boal. City Lights, San Francisco, CA. 1995 "At last, a defiant radical critique of the information millennium. . . A burning barricade across the highway to the total surveillance society." --Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz Resisting the Virtual Life lays bare connections between information technologies and the abstract, virtual life that all of us--technophile and Luddite--are now compelled to lead. Scholars, writers, artists, and activists gauge the unsettling effects of the new video, computer, and networked communications on our ways of life in a restructured world. Exposing relations of power and dependence, they offer strategies of resistance to the global rewiring of body and psyche, work and community, literature and art.

Smith, John. Collective Intelligence in Computer Based Collaboration. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates ,1995. Smith discusses, intelligence amplification, collaboration as an information processing activity, computer support for collaboration, cognitive models and architectures, building a concept of collective intelligence, collective memory, collective processing of knowledge. collective strategy, and collective awareness and control issues.

Woolley, Benjamin. Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Penguin Books. London 1992. In Virtual Worlds, Benjamin Woolley examines the reality of virtual reality. He looks at the dramatic intellectual and cultural upheavals that gave birth to it, at the hype that surrounds it, at the people who have promoted it, and at the dramatic implications of its development. According to Woolley Virtual reality is not simply a technology, it is a way of thinking created and promoted by a group of technologists and thinkers that sees itself as creating our future. Virtual Worlds reveals the politics and culture of these virtual realists, and examines whether they are creating reality, or losing their grasp of it.

MORE TO COME . . .